The most transgressive video maker working today has a message: cover up your privates and pass the pentocyclene

We're in one of those Persian-nightmare minimansions in the Valley. The gorilla in the bathtub and the cardboard robot on the stairs are getting ready while a dozen extras curl up in sleeping bags on a king-sized bed. French songstress Charlotte Gainsbourg strikes a languorous pose on the bed and practices her lip sync. Sitting in a nearby chaise, Beck — lighter than air and translucent, as if composed of scattered hydrogen atoms — rehearses the playback on a cowboy guitar. "The concept for the video is maximum disorder," says director Keith Schofield, stopping by the pool to instruct a few of the extras on the art of the dead man's float, which doesn't come easily to Marlboro-lunged hipsters.

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In his short career, Schofield — thirty, thinning hair, a veganesque physique, wearing black-framed glasses and a plaid cowboy shirt — has emerged as a grand master of Webby viral edge, a mocking virtuoso of anything you might dare call a moral sensibility. His videos are kinsmen of "The Aristocrats" joke, which is to say, they have a creosote-black humor about them — so transgressive, they're funny.

The videos — and now a growing number of commercials for companies like Target, McDonald's, and Virgin Mobile — all share a must-see, must-share, digitally manipulated contagiousness that Schofield thinks of as the "visual hook." Break-dancers fly in slow motion, cell-phone photos come to life, the ground literally shifts in acts of video fluxes. The only constant is their disorientation, their indeterminacy, and, most of all, their screw-you-if-you-can't-take-a-joke humor.

Back at the mansion, Schofield is ready for the cameras to roll, but Beck needs a pick so he can play a guitar that no one will hear. The gorilla happens to have one.